Category: Daily Life in Cambodia

This is a really encouraging happening, a group of young people down on the Phnom Penh riverfront picking up trash.  The littering landscape here is like it was in Kentucky in the 1940s and 50s.  People then threw paper, bottles, cigarettes, etc., out the car window or just dropped trash on the street as they walked along.  Then came the Don’t Be a Litterbug campaign.  Change didn’t happen overnight but anyone throwing trash on a street in the US today knows it’s wrong.  Most people don’t know that here so it’s heartening to see this group setting a good public example by picking up after others.

 

 

“The coolers at the top aren’t heavy but they kinda catch the wind….!”

 

A utility pole in Phnom Penh, outside Mother Teresa’s sisters’ home for infants, complete with a pair of denim shorts hanging at the bottom.   How would you like to be a lineman/woman here?

 

A couple months ago I posted a photo (not a very good photo) of a Phnom Penh tuk-tuk equipped with a solar panel and wondered what the panel was powering.  Here is a birds-eye view of another tuk-tuk with another panel, a bigger one, so the idea is catching on.  The question remains, though, what the solar power is directed to since lighting is an after-thought, a non-essential on vehicles in Cambodia.  If you have lights front or rear, or both, that is fine.  If you don’t have lights, that is fine, too.  Notice that this tuk-tuk has a non-functioning light on its upper right.

In areas with a large informal economy, it is not unusual to find vendors with the same type of merchandise setting up for business right beside each other.  People like it because they know where to go to find certain merchandise and they have a wider range of goods to choose from.

These are mobile pop-up shops selling clothing along Street 63 in the Boeung Keng Kang I area of Phnom Penh.  They are set up alongside the wall surrounding a high school so there is no interference on that side of the street with local comings and goings.

Click here to see the variations in the mobile pop-up shop wagons.

Last month I posted some pictures of piles of coconuts being sold along Street 63.  If you don’t live in that area, this man will bring them to you.

The tropics are great incubators for big bugs and we have our share of big cockroaches.  We have so many of them that the locals just take them for granted and don’t even react to them.  They are very active at night and on any trip down to the kitchen after dark, they will be in full control–running all over the kitchen counter (where this one is) and going in and out under the backdoor.  And then on any given morning 3-5 of them could be lying on their backs dead or moribund in the kitchen, another 2-3 in the breakfast area, another few in the living room, etc.  They are just a fact of life.  I was really surprised yesterday because I was in a parking lot and one big roach started sauntering across and a Cambodian man stepped on it!  Usually it’s only the foreigners who freak out at them.

It rains almost every afternoon now in the Cambodian rainy season and there was a light rain this evening as I came back across town after a wedding rehearsal.  Here is how some people coped with the wet:

This is a combination shop you wouldn’t see much in the US.  On the left is a small eatery, selling pre-cooked foods selected by the customer from large pots hopefully covered with lids to keep out the dust.  Muslim customers (this is near a Muslin neighborhood) can eat with no qualms because the sign assures all the food is halal.  On the right, in the contraption on wheels made from chicken wire and shelves, the proprietors are selling all sorts of metal hand tools and utensils–machetes, axes, shovels, hoes, scythes, etc.  To protect their merchandise and their customers, they are hanging a tarpaulin to block the sun and rain.  They are tieing it to the telephone lines, probably figuring it won’t bother anyone–and probably figuring that half of them are non-functioning anyway.